Audio clips of about 100k entries spoken by Japanese native speakers are now (optionally) linked to the display of the entries. The option can be turned on or off via WWWJDIC's customization page. The clips have been provided by japanesepod101.com (which many TJP people will know), and are served from their site.

You need the Flash Player plugin in your browser to hear the clips.

The feature is installed at Monash and on the NRC (Canada) mirror. Other mirrors will catch up soon.

I've been going back and forth with jdic today and the last time it suddenly had all these audio links. On seeing them, I remembered that somewhere someone had mentioned that it was a feature in the works, and It's a great feature to see go active. I'm always recommending people use merriam-webster.com for English pronunciation because of the audio links which, unlike dictionary.com, don't require an account to activate.

kurisuto wrote:Great idea ! I have to say learning pitch accent is on my list of things to do (although I'm not really optimistic about it...), so it's a pretty useful feature. Keep up the good work !

Unfortunately, there's a slight problem: there's no way for you to distinguish between a word accented on the last mora and an unaccented word. (The difference only appears when the word is a particle, or possibly when followed by another word.)

Also, learning the pitch accent of a word just by listening to it is pretty difficult. There are many times I think I hear an accent that isn't there, or I miss one that is there, or I put it on the wrong syllable.

What I do to study pitch accent is, I study sentences using Anki, and for the majority of these, I have sound examples. In addition, I mark the pitch accent on each word using underlining on accented morae. I use dictionary.goo.ne.jp, the Pocket Kenkyusha dictionary, or the NHK Akusento Jiten to look up the word's accent. I don't count the answer wrong if I respond with improper pitch accent, but I do repeat the sentence with proper accent.

furrykef wrote:Unfortunately, there's a slight problem: there's no way for you to distinguish between a word accented on the last mora and an unaccented word. (The difference only appears when the word is a particle, or possibly when followed by another word.)

Also, learning the pitch accent of a word just by listening to it is pretty difficult. There are many times I think I hear an accent that isn't there, or I miss one that is there, or I put it on the wrong syllable.

That's pretty much why I said I wasn't really optimistic about it : the other day, in linguistic class, our teacher said the word "ongaku" first with the Tôkyô accent, then with the Kansai accent. No need to say I didn't even see the difference. She spoke rather slowly, articulated very clearly, and repeated many times, I still couldn't hear it (or I thought I could hear it but I was wrong). It reminds me of when I couldn't hear the stress in English, let alone pronounce words correctly. Now I wonder how come I couldn't. As for pitch accent... I have to start once again from scratch.

furrykef wrote:What I do to study pitch accent is, I study sentences using Anki, and for the majority of these, I have sound examples. In addition, I mark the pitch accent on each word using underlining on accented morae. I use dictionary.goo.ne.jp, the Pocket Kenkyusha dictionary, or the NHK Akusento Jiten to look up the word's accent. I don't count the answer wrong if I respond with improper pitch accent, but I do repeat the sentence with proper accent.

I see you're courageous ! I was hoping I could catch it more or less passively, but if that doesn't work, I think I'm gonna have to follow your path.

It may be quite possible to learn it passively. After all, most people do it that way... information in English on pitch accent is hard to come by (except in Japanese: The Spoken Language, but I have no idea how extensive its coverage of "rules" for pitch accent is, since I don't have that book). However, I've posted a thread about it here before, and some people here haven't picked it up at all... including Mike Cash, who has been learning Japanese since before some of us were even born! (But he also said that he somehow still sounds native-like enough that if he's talking to someone over the phone, they don't figure out he's not a native for quite a while. I can imagine it took him a long time to get to that point, though!)

Myself, I use written accents in my flash cards because I'm just obsessive about doing things the "right" way. I'm probably going to be working with the written language a lot more than the spoken language (since two of my main interests are manga and video games from before the voice acting era), which means my pronunciation and listening skills are liable to be horrible unless I deliberately practice them. It also means I can't really afford to learn pitch accent by sitting around and waiting for a native speaker say words I haven't heard spoken aloud before.

The downside is that looking up accents for words takes up some time, and is one reason I'm progressing through JFBP1 more slowly than I'd like. dictionary.goo.ne.jp usually makes it quick and easy enough (the small number next to the word is the mora it's accented on; 0 means no accent), but when I have to break out a paper dictionary, as I often have to do for certain common adverbs, it's a bit of a hassle. But I figure as I progress, I'll have to do it less often.

Also, you still have to guess at names. Even with spoken audio, I still have trouble figuring out where the accents belong. In such a case I either take a guess and note in my flash cards that the accent is a guess, or if I really don't know, I just leave it as flatly accented. It's probably not really worth the trouble to find out how names are accented if you don't have an easy resource for looking them up.

Unfortunately, a lot of people argue against studying pitch accent in a written form, and often cite this article in so doing. If you actually read that article, though, despite its title, it actually doesn't argue against marking the accent locations at all; rather, it seems to argue that you cannot get a feel for how it actually sounds from written words alone, which I fully agree with. But getting a feel for how it sounds and knowing where the accents actually go are two separate problems -- the former is merely a matter of pronunciation habits, while the latter is a matter of memorization.

Well... I'm already satisfied when I manage to read them, so, their accent ? I give up in advance

Anyways, I think studying it both in writing and orally is probably the best way to do it, at least in the beginning (if you don't have any clue about the accent of a certain word, and that like me in most cases you can't hear it, I think at least knowing where it is supposed to be can help, that way you know what you have to look for - or hear for if I may say so). But ultimately, I think the best - but not infallible as you pointed out - option still is living in Japan (well, that's the best option in most cases so it's not really surprising). And thanks for the link to the article, seems particularly interesting.